No, I've never been especially strong, and while my hair is long, God has not commanded me not to ever cut it. I identify with Samson because of the shared trait of seeming stupidity. I don't consider myself stupid, and I have to ask for grace to have much patience for stupidity in others, but I have shown the exact same epic stupidity in my life as Samson. I don't know any addicts who haven't.
I don't know if Samson was a sex addict, seriously co-dependent for some reason, was literally blinded by love and rendered stupid or what? If about all you know of Samson is he was strong, had long hair and loved Delilah, you can check out his story at Judges 16. The basic information is that Samson, a defender of Israel, fell for Delilah, a woman from the nation of his enemy. She asks him the secret of his strength and what wold make him weak. He feeds her a bogus story and goes to sleep. She does what he said would make him weak and calls his enemies. She wakes him, telling him his enemies are there for him, he wakes, shakes off what she did because it's not what really makes him weak and his enemies can't take him.
That should pretty much be the end of the story, right? The next verse should read something like, and Samson fled the house of Delilah, the untrustworthy harlot who tried to trick him, and never returned to her bed. But no. The exact same thing happened two more times with the only difference being that he gave a different false story about what would make him weak. Surely that would be enough so that Samson would get it through his thick skull that Delilah was no good for him, was only trying to hurt him and that he should stay the heck away from her, right?
She asks him again and says basically, how can you say you love me when you don't even trust me with the truth? You keep lying to me about your secret! And this is where Samson should say, how can you expect me to trust you when every time I tell you how I can be bound and made weak it happens!? But no, he breaks down and tells her the truth, that if his hair is cut he will be as weak as anyone. Sure enough, she shaved his head, called his enemies and the next thing he experiences is being caught, chained, blinded and thrown in a pit to work as a slave for his enemies.
Stupid, right? But what if Samson wasn't an ignorant oaf? What if he wasn't stupid at all, or at least no more stupid than any of us? Haven't we all done as he did to some extent or another? Maybe we didn't get quite as harsh a result as him, but some of us may have, or come close. How many of us put our hands in the fire, got burned and did it again?
Every time I hang out with so and so trouble is the result. Stop going over there then, stupid. No, it will be different next time. When I drink I lose control and wind up embarrassing myself or getting in trouble or I'm sick and feel horrible half the next day. Then stop drinking and that won't happen. Whenever I stay up late to watch TV I struggle to make it to work on time and am dragging all day. Big things, small things. Horrible consequences like destroyed relationships, wrecks and prison. Little difficulties like running late or being worried about paying bills because of spending too much on that great sale. Most of us have at least one area of our life where we are too much like our friend Samson. Seriously, anyone around us could say, are you kidding? Don't you see that when you do this something negative always happens? Why do you keep doing it? Are you stupid or what?
I have come to believe that the answer for us and for Samson is or what. Samson was a slave before the Philistines put him in chains. I think that is part of why we are told two chapters earlier that Samson made a contest out of a riddle he came up with that stumped everyone. He wasn't stupid. But powerlessness and stupidity look a lot alike sometimes. I think that's why we hate to admit that we are powerless. It's brings shame, because we feel stupid. We should be able to stop putting our hand in the flames, and we can't understand why we don't.
It's not a question of intelligence, no matter how it may feel. It's not a question of will power, and no matter how many people in our lives look at us and say, just stop it already, or how much we agree with them, we can't simply stop the slide into giving ourselves over completely to the one or the thing that will turn us over to the enemy. We must have help. We need power beyond our own.
The good news is that Jesus came to set the captive free. There is help. We don't have to earn it or deserve it. God loves us as we are, not as we should be, even when our actions are stupid, go against our own best interests and we deserve to get burned. He has made a way to protect us from ourselves. He wants to give us victory over our difficulties and stupidity. It is His desire to break our chains, not just the ones that happen after we've been foolish enough to tell Delilah the truth, but the ones by which we are drug back to her bed in the first place. We can surrender our will and our lives to His care, because He cares for us. And the ironic thing is that when we submit to Him and give Him control we finally find freedom and the power to say no.
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